A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation

This takes place in the original world, before His Majesty set up the pseudo‐contact point. It includes past events.

As always, skipping this won’t affect understanding of the main story.

Everyone knew the name of that mercenary corps.

It wasn’t that they had an especially large number of members. Compared to the regular armies of the various countries, they were tiny.

Yet the moment battle began, every enemy soldier who ended up before them knew fear.

Their surging, body‑shaking fighting spirit crashed forward like a raging tide, and no matter how fine a strategy you tried to meet them with, they would simply smash it aside with overwhelming force. Stand before that group and even their allies would shudder.

Every country tried desperately to tame them, but they served no one, only drifting to whichever banner piled up the most gold. That stance never changed.

Precisely because of that, few people knew that they would sometimes extend a hand, preferentially, to someone they liked.

“…………”

A lone man stood on an open plain where nothing blocked his line of sight.

His face was utterly pale, lifeless as a corpse. With dull eyes he gazed up toward the overcast sky, his hair swaying in the lukewarm wind.

“Captain, this area’s been wiped clean. Enemies, zero.”

“……I can see that.”

“Figured as much.”

The reason nothing blocked his vision was that he had cut down every single person who had tried to charge in and block it.

The wind was lukewarm because just moments before, this place had been in the very heart of the fires of war.

The man stood atop a veritable mountain of corpses, a blood‑soaked sword in one hand.

He gave the subordinate who had come to report a single glance, answered in a languid voice that almost melted into his sigh, and took the cloth that was offered to wipe down his blade. The white fabric was instantly dyed red, but no one here was the sort of person who would bother to care.

“As expected of the mercenary corps’ top‑tier force, Fourth Legion ‘Grim Reaper’ captain—come out of a melee without a single scratch!”

The mercenary corps was organized into several legions.

The captains who commanded them were chosen from among their already small, elite numbers; even among such people, the man who led the fourth legion was a particularly conspicuous existence.

He had earned that rank at the youngest age in the corps’ history, and within a mercenary corps hailed as one of the continent’s best, he held the undisputed title of greatest combat power. You would never imagine it from that corpse‑like face.

“That kind of crap’s annoying… Where’s the captain?”

“Charging the very front lines. Want us to go back him up?”

“…………”

Whenever this man was asked to make a situational judgment, there was always one face that came to mind.

Because he knew. If it were that person, in a moment like this he would surely make the best possible decision.

“And then… just like that, he…!”

A sudden light flared in his thoroughly clouded eyes.

His subordinate’s face twitched as he involuntarily took a step back.

“Just vanishing on me outta nowhere! Like hell I can accept that!!”

“C‑captain, calm d—”

“I even stormed my way into that king’s castle and got ‘dunno’ and him blowing up at me! I’m the one who doesn’t know, I don’t know a damn thing, I don’t know jack about the situation, and he has the nerve to get pissed—what the hell’s his problem, you gotta be kidding me!!”

Two, three corpses were booted aside and tumbled across the ground.

They were enemy soldiers, but they were still bodies; they’d been told again and again that desecrating remains bred needless resentment. His subordinate just watched his captain, now completely past the reach of reason, and thought ahhh, there he goes. Ever since he’d met that man, episodes like this had hugely decreased, but in the past this usually lifeless, wraith‑like man had apparently flipped out at enemy troops like this quite often.